CACI, the EVP, CFO, and treasurer. Thank you so much for being here.
You bet. My pleasure.
To kick off, it's a mix of investors with the industrial conference. Could you just go through an overview of who CACI is, key markets?
Yeah. We are a national security contractor. About 90% of our revenue focused on national security between the Department of Defense, the various intelligence agencies, and the Department of Homeland Security. We are about 60% technology and about 40% expertise. That's a result of a portfolio evolution that we've had underway for the better part of a decade, where we have moved from being a predominantly government IT services type provider to being a supplier of technology and outcomes and driving that portfolio evolution through both pruning and managing the portfolio organically, and also through a series of acquisitions. Where over the last decade, we've done a number of transactions and have used the balance sheet strategically to reposition the company along the lines I just described.
On that strategic shift, to having a bigger technology piece, even though CACI is still in this IT services bucket, could you talk through where those tech pieces are now, what end markets you guys serve there?
The areas where we participate in technology are focused really on a couple of key areas of interest to us. Space is one, where we recently we recently completed the acquisition of ARKA from Blackstone, which some of you, many of you will probably be aware of. We completed that in early March, we announced at the end of December. That brings some really exquisite electro-optical and infrared imaging with particular space capabilities to the portfolio. We have recently disclosed that our space business is over $1 billion a year in revenue. About two-thirds of that now will be ARKA.
The other key area of interest to us, and one where we have several decades of experience, is electromagnetic warfare, where we use the electromagnetic spectrum primarily for signals intelligence collection and characterization, as well as a few other areas, optical communication terminals, and a number of other areas. Counter UAS is a particularly important part these days of our EW business.
Mm-hmm. With that shift, having EW, EOIR, C-UAS, how do you guys look at the synergies between the tech portfolio, having software-defined applications, and the services piece that still exists where you need that expertise?
Yeah. We undertook describing the portfolio in terms of technology and expertise, a number of years ago, better part of a decade ago, as a way that we could articulate the portfolio evolution that we were undertaking. Basically, it is grounded in the fact that we had a number as a long-term company at the time, 50 or so years old. We had a variety of really deep mission-focused customer relationships, and the strategy was to use those relationships and leverage them into higher margin, higher value contributed technology positions, which is what we've done significantly, to a significant degree over the last decade or so.
In those success stories, is there one that you'd point to where this is a contract that we were able to compete for that we wouldn't have been able to previously, or new program that we won from having this mindset and strategy?
Yeah. There are a handful, Jordan, and one I think of particular note would be, our TLS Manpack, where we have a brigade, combat team level tactical, SIGINT suite, manpackable wearable, where we had a $1 million OTA, other transaction agreement, for those of you that are familiar with the, with the government's, sort of ongoing and evolving procurement philosophy, where we were able, with a $1 million OTA, to invest, with a customer and in relatively short order, turn that into a $500 million program of record, which we're performing on now and successfully delivering.
On the contract changes, since you brought it up, what are you seeing that's different now in the new [DOW] cadence, types of contracts? How has it impacted CACI and how you guys are thinking about pursuing new opportunities?
Yeah. That's a really interesting thing to stop and talk about a little bit for us. In this portfolio evolution that I referred to earlier in our remarks here today, we undertook a number of changes based on things that we were seeing and things that we thought deserved specific strategic responses on our part. One of them was to focus on outcome-based technology differentiated solutions. One was recognizing that the speed of conflict in the future could only really be adequately addressed by software-centric systems. The speed of the fight was increasing at a rate that really couldn't be addressed by hardware changes.
The other thing was for us to bid fewer and larger opportunities, which gave us more of an opportunity to shape, and position ourselves in a good place competitively, and also to invest ahead of need, which is an important part of our strategy. That is to selectively use our own resources, in many cases, to be able to sell commercially. Even in those cases where we're not selling commercially, we're working in pre-program award phases with customers to develop, approaches that will later be manifest to the contract. It turns out, that those are very, very much aligned, with the current administration's procurement, strategies.
We find ourselves in a happy spot of having identified and deliberately positioned ourselves, nearly a decade ago, to a place that is turning out in the current marketplace to be, exactly, where we would like to be, which has given us a real head start in the current environment.
On that for new opportunities that are coming with the presidential budget request for 2027, it's in the areas you guys have focused on for the last 10 years, and now more recently with ARKA. Where, where do you look in the budget to say, "This is a great windfall for us or a big opportunity?
Well, you know, look, the areas in which we're focused are areas of really current interest that all of us see every day in the news. I mean, the current geopolitical environment and the current obvious defense technology shifts are exactly aligned with things that are important to us and our priorities. They're really reflected in the budget areas that you mentioned. Things like intelligence, sensing and collection, things like Counter-UAS, and use of the electromagnetic spectrum generally for a variety of offensive and defensive offerings are really well aligned with exactly where things are going today.
One of the things I think, Jordan, that we don't, we don't probably talk about enough or isn't necessarily widely understood is that there's a lot of discussion about the top-line budget, and we all know the president's budget request, $1.5 trillion. There's a variety of views on how much of that will actually end up being appropriated. It may be that it's, you know, something less than that. It may be the whole $1.5 billion. That's relatively, not particularly relevant to us, and the reason for that is the areas of focus that I talked about before and the fact that really there's strong bipartisan support for the parts of the budget that are particularly important to us.
You know, to the extent the budget ends up a little less than perhaps what was asked, those problems get solved, you know, in large platform programs and production rates and things of that sort. No one is suggesting that we don't need a C-UAS strategy, for instance.
You know, we feel, again, one more way in which we feel particularly well-positioned.
On that too, with midterms coming up, potential for CR, how do you plan the business around uncertainty of what the funding will look like, and then even if we have flat or no new programs?
We, as you might imagine, we spend a fair amount of time managing that and monitoring it. It's notable that it has not affected us in the past. Continuing resolutions have sort of come to be a way of life. We can each have our own personal political views on whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but, you know, CRs are with us to stay. It's also worth observing, though, related to your CR question, that much of our portfolio has proven to be, again, as a matter of strategy and design, to be particularly resilient and durable in the face of budget uncertainty. Just even in the last year or a handful of quarters, you know, we had a huge hue and cry about DOGE.
We spent a lot of time talking externally about why we didn't expect those to be an issue, and we were gonna be relatively impervious to any effects from it. That turned out to be true. It came up again in the context of the budget last year, where we said, "Look, the things we're doing are deemed critical. Overwhelmingly, it's not gonna be a big deal." That proved to be true. We heard it even though the DHS is a big customer. We heard it again related to the extended DHS shutdown. We said it's not a big deal. Turned out to be true. A really important part of this strategy is that we have put ourselves in places where we really see very limited opportunity to not do these things.
The things that we do are among the most important and among the most resilient in terms of budgeting and political support. Strong bipartisan support for many, many of the things that we do.
On that, even in uncertainty of funding, pursuing less contracts that are larger, have more endurance, where else in the portfolio would you guys like to start bidding? Is there anything that defines the contracts that you would pursue?
Well, you know, our revenue this year, we're approaching a $10 billion revenue enterprise. The midpoint of our guidance range for our fiscal year this year is $9.5 billion. You know, we have about a $300 billion TAM, so we have, you know, lots of wood to cut in the part of the forest that we already live in. We see a lot of opportunities to do that in places where we are. ARKA has, gives us a particularly good example there, where we have the ability to use some of the tools that the ARKA team has developed for imagery processing analysis and apply those to signals intelligence analysis.
We also have the opportunity now to pursue a number of multi-int, multi-intelligence source opportunities by putting imagery and signals intelligence together into single intelligence projects, products, that can provide a more holistic view of situations and circumstances in particular places. There are a number of areas where we see lots of opportunity in places where we already are with customers with whom we already have strong relationships. We see excellent growth prospects here in, you know, in the near term right there.
Just on ARKA too, could you talk about for your 26 guide, how it impacted, you guys did bring up revenue, EBITDA margins increased?
Yeah. We increased the revenue guidance for FY 2026, for ARKA by $150 million. That's a little bit over a quarter. It's a quarter in a couple days. I would hasten to point out, you know, not being a service business, this is not a linear enterprise. The business is growing, but there's also some natural lumpiness in hardware businesses and whatnot. But we increased the guidance, you know, for the year by the 150 of revenue for ARKA.
Yeah
Did I get your question?
Yeah, just, the impact.
Yeah.
Then to, you talked about the new capabilities with ARKA. Longer term, how are you guys thinking about synergies that can be unlocked with it, and anything else that can change go-to-market? Does it increase your international presence?
There are a number of areas where we see opportunities to develop synergies. When we made the acquisition decision, there were no, there were no cost synergies or revenue synergies contemplated. We expect to enjoy both of those. We've already, in the course of the integration, moved much of the overhead functions to our shared service center in Oklahoma City and have realized some indirect savings. I mentioned earlier the opportunity to apply their tools, the image tools to the SIGINT intelligence data, as well as the opportunity to provide multi-int data. That's an area where we see some opportunity for revenue synergy that we've not not done in the past.
Gives us the ability to do some exciting new things where we already have customers, you know, expressing interest and eager to engage in those discussions.
Just back on the award environment, now that DHS is funded, are you starting to see things there pick up or other areas that have changed?
Yeah, it's a little bit soon to know that.
I would say that the DHS restart is relatively new, and I'm not sure I can make a definitive statement about that yet. I would notice, though, I would note that even in the case of the broader government shutdown, which of course has been over now for some time, we have not seen a full return to pre-shutdown activity levels, particularly as it relates to awards. The administrative work of the government bounced back relatively quickly, and we saw really minimal disruption in invoicing and billing, funding, normal funding obligations. Those things kind of came back to normal very quickly. The awards and acquisition progress has been a little bit slower, which I think you've probably seen across the industry, really.
I'm DHS too, and with CACI's counter-UAS systems, what opportunities are you seeing there, where we start to see new grants and funding coming through specifically for the World Cup, the Olympics, in trying to harden critical infrastructure?
Yeah, there are a number of opportunities, this actually is a great place to talk about Merlin, our commercially developed counter-UAS system, where we've got very strong demand impulses related to sporting events and the World Cup in particular. Also, as you mentioned, critical infrastructure. It's an important part of the counter-UAS layer of Golden Dome. We have a unit on the southern border that's been there for, I think, a month or six weeks in a demonstration kind of phase where it's met with great success and is proving its utility in sort of monitoring the border broadly. We've also tested Merlin, demoed Merlin in a number of [DOW], Department of Defense events over the last quarter or so, where it has also done well and been well received.
I think as the whole Counter-UAS acquisition process, you know, gathers momentum, I expect we'll see, you know, much more activity and much more demand. Again, that's a commercially developed system we invested, developed ourselves and, you know, are offering for sale commercially. Again, very much aligned with the administration's acquisition priorities.
Could you, we're seeing so much competition for C-UAS and just UAS systems themselves. Could you just talk about what makes Merlin different and how you are able to apply technology from something like the southern border all the way up to Golden Dome?
There are a number of things about Merlin, I think that differentiate it and make it particularly interesting. One is the detection range. Many of the competing systems have, you know, 2, 3, 4 km sort of detection ranges. We talk about 75 kilometers, and we've actually in several cases overachieved on that. That's important for a couple reasons. It's important because it gives you obviously much more reaction time. Depending on the target, these can vary a little bit, but at some of the shorter ranges, you know, there may be 15, 20 seconds of reaction time versus 15 or 18 minutes at the detection range that we've achieved. That gives you two things.
It gives you obviously more chance to, more opportunities to select a defeat mode, non-kinetic, which we have a number of solutions, or if the operator were to decide to use a kinetic solution, you have time to do that as well. Obviously, if you have 15 or 20 seconds, you don't have much time to do much at all. The other thing that's important about that detection range. Well, there are two things, two economic advantages to that. One is that because we have a number of non-kinetic solutions to defeat incoming threats, you can avoid using a, you know, $3 million or $4 million missile to shoot down a $25,000 drone. It also affords low or no collateral sort of solutions.
You don't have to have, you know, a debris field over St. Louis or somewhere, wherever the threat is. The other thing that's important about the economics, in addition to the non-kinetic solution being obviously economically preferable, is the number of systems you need. If you think about the concentric circle that you draw around a system with a 75 km range, detection range, and compare it to the concentric circle you draw around some of the other competing systems, you quickly see that you need, you know, many, many more, dozens often, to have, to afford a similar range of protection. In addition to that, and finally, Merlin is one of the very few systems that handles a full range of UAS threats, meaning class 1 to class 5.
If you think about class 1 and 2 as being the sort of readily available hobbyist, type threat drone, which can obviously be outfitted with weapons and different things that could make it very lethal, but it's a smaller, generally available device. Up to class 5, which are the nation-state sort of small aircraft, sized drones, we can address that entire range and most of the other systems do not. Focusing only on the smaller ones. There's a number of points of differentiation that we think make Merlin a pretty exciting alternative in the scenarios that you mentioned.
If you could, how does UAS fit into Golden Dome to the extent you're allowed to talk about Golden Dome?
We can talk about it a little bit, you know, threats, the threats in Golden Dome, there are two ways to play here. One is in the sense-and-detect dimension, the other is in the actual Counter-UAS. To the extent that the threat is an incoming missile, that's gonna be another part of the capability. To the extent the incoming threat is a drone, obviously the counter-drone activity is helpful. The other thing that we do, have the capability to do and look forward to applying here is being able to defeat some of these threats at what we call left of launch. If you think about the timeline, we have the ability to detect RF activity that's associated with pending launches.
We probably can't talk about this in great detail, but if you think about the fact that you have a threat somewhere and you're getting ready to attack with it, there are a number of things that start to happen. Systems get turned on, sensors get turned on. You know, there are signatures associated with the fact that you're getting ready to use something offensively. The fact that there may be an opportunity to defeat the threat before it's even in the air obviously is, you know, the best answer of all. That could be any one of a number of ways, with a cyber payload or disabling the system in some way, turning it off.
You know, there are a number of ways to do that. The sooner you can detect the threat, the sooner you can start to apply some defensive measures to it.
Mm-hmm. For a program like a Golden Dome where it's layered defense, there are a lot of components the [DOW] wants to have as many participants as reasonable. How do you decide when you go to market with somebody else and what makes them a good partner?
Well, we collaborate already with other parts of the systems and other providers. Look, if you think a little bit about Golden Dome, on some level, some aspect of the program is a giant system engineering job, right? I mean, the government has been very clear about the fact that we wanna use the things we have. We wanna reuse and modify things that are available to us now, both for economic efficiency and also for timing. Then certain things will have to be built or designed from new and, you know, hopefully that's a minimal part of it. To the extent we're reusing or incorporating existing capabilities, that will require collaboration among all of the participants.
I mean, the systems engineering part of this is an interesting part of the puzzle. The detection and the left-of-launch capabilities, for instance, that I was talking about a few minutes ago, are important areas where that utility might apply. I would also point out that we have the ability now to do what we call tip and cue, which is take an incoming threat that we've identified, characterized, and if it's determined by the operator that the best solution to defeat that is a kinetic solution, we have the ability to tip and cue that, we call it, to the, you know, to a battlefield management, you know, any missile system of a different, you know, someone else's.
I mean, the systems all have to interact and work together to provide the layered defense that will be necessary to make Golden Dome successful.
Interoperability is important for partnerships. What makes a company a good acquisition target for CACI?
Our acquisition program is very much focused on gaps. We don't buy revenue. We don't, we're not buying for bulk. We're buying to fill technology needs, customer needs, very specific targeted areas of interest. It's really about expanding our capability and getting wider, not just bigger and bulkier. That really changes the answer to your question is gonna be that really changes all the it changes almost as fast as technology does, right?
You know, we will continue to see areas, I think, where we can supplement existing SIGINT and [ELINT], collection and processing capabilities, new ways to apply AI, any one of a number of things. All those dimensions, you know, are important to our ongoing gap analysis, which we, you know, which we're doing, you know, more or less continuously.
I guess to post-ARKA, where would you need to see leverage to do another big deal, and what gaps are you guys looking at now?
Well, the keystone, the keystone of our, of our capital allocation strategy is, you know, flexible and opportunistic. You know, when the right things present themselves, you know, we're positioned to act. I have talked about the fact recently, with our leverage at about 4x now, trailing 12 months, even though that we sort of like to be 2.5 to 3x . That's sort of our comfort range where we think in the current rate environment is the right balance between having the cost of capital benefit of leverage, but still having the flexibility to pop up when something is interesting. Does that mean if, you know, some really eye-watering opportunity presented itself and we were 3.5x levered that we wouldn't do it? You know, I mean, probably not.
I wouldn't rule anything out. I mean, in general, we'd like to be two and a half to three times, and I think in the near term we're gonna be focused on that. Probably won't talk specifically about gaps of current interest other than to say, as I alluded a few minutes ago, that that gap analysis is ongoing and, you know, it's, you know, more or less continuous. We do also maintain a pipeline of potential targets, and we, you know, meet regularly with those potential targets and, you know, they often sort of ripen at whatever the seller's, you know, pace will be. We're patient and disciplined acquirers.
Right. Then with a few minutes left, since you talked about AI, how are you guys using AI internally just to be more efficient, in developing it for customers? I think it's always interesting. You guys were probably one of the first actual LLM makers before the broader market was interested.
Yeah
and knew about them.
Look, AI has been an important part of many things we do for a long time, for decades. It's become a little bit more of an item lately. Obviously, we're talking about it more, which is good. We use AI for a number of things. We use it for everything from matching cash receipts to receivables. It's freed up a weekend a quarter for Jim in doing the first draft of our earnings call script. You know, we use it for a number of things. Those are internal uses. Obviously, in terms of our business, it's been a big factor in intelligence analysis, again, for decades, and we've used it for a number of things.
The applications are becoming a little bit more sophisticated, and it gives us some really interesting productivity and efficiency benefits. It's a really interesting tool. We're excited to embrace it and use it. I would point out just because it's often discussed in terms of being a threat, that we actually see it exactly the opposite, as being a great opportunity. Some of you will be aware of the fact that we generate and collect as a nation a prodigious amount of intelligence information. A big part of the challenge is being able to prioritize and characterize the places to spend actual human time on particular data and information that's collected.
The ability to apply some of these tools to that data is a tremendous advantage, both in terms of being able to look eventually at more data and also to make sure we're looking at the right data. We're looking at the most, the most productive and the highest opportunity of, you know, finding something of interest and neutralizing threats.
Great. Awesome.
Yeah.
All right. With 20 seconds left.
You're right.
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Thank you, Jordan. I appreciate it. Thanks.
Thank you, guys.